James Gurney

This daily weblog by Dinotopia creator James Gurney is for illustrators, plein-air painters, sketchers, comic artists, animators, art students, and writers. You'll find practical studio tips, insights into the making of the Dinotopia books, and first-hand reports from art schools and museums.

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However, you can quote images or text without asking permission on your educational or non-commercial blog, website, or Facebook page as long as you give me credit and provide a link back. Students and teachers can also quote images or text for their non-commercial school activity. It's also OK to do an artistic copy of my paintings as a study exercise without asking permission.

Wednesday, August 2, 2017

I choose a limited palette of gouache: purple, lemon yellow, white, and two shades of raw umber. (Raw umber varies a lot by brand; the Shinhan is really more of a raw sienna). I add vermilion later on as an accent color.

The limited palette unifies the color scheme, and it's fun to try to mix a green with that blue-leaning purple and green-leaning yellow.

In the video, I'm using a time-honored method for checking measurements. I choose a unit of length— the apparent height of the opening of green awning.

11 comments:

Seconded for posting on YouTube - FB is (a) blocked at a lot of workspaces and (b) not accessible w/o a FB account, I believe?

Regarding measurements, I just recently learned of this simple but cool tool called "proportional divider", which is trivially easy to make and use:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEZMKc0nMAg(sorry if this is old news)

Charley and Peter, Yes, you're right. I know embedding from FB is an issue, but here's the deal:

When I make videos of 1 minute or less, I post them on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, platforms that are optimized for micro videos. But I don't post them on YouTube, because the community on that platform rightly complains that the videos are too short. So I wait until I've got 4 or 5 related micro videos and I weave them together into a 3 - 5 minute YouTube video, adding endscreens, titles, voiceover, and other touches. For example this animal video is made up of short FB/TW/IG vids: https://youtu.be/ezrRr-PNUWI

Are there other free upload platforms that are unblocked and allow good embed options?

As a relative beginner I find this technique pretty challenging still and need to practice it a lot more. I have found that my eyes sometimes start to hurt when focusing on this style of measurement. I am not sure if this is because I often measure with the pointy side of the pencil, because I am using it on objects too small (like small basic cubes for still lifes)or if I need to look into glasses of some sort.

A somewhat related issue but when it comes to measuring and transferring angles of a box with a pencil I am uncertain if I should trust the actual measurement I take of the angle as the final line or if I should use them to estimate where the vanishing points probably are and then adjust the final line accordingly. Probably a very beginner question but any thoughts on that?

Measuring strategies, while seemingly a little dry, would make a great series of videos. When painting from life, the painter benefits from being able to measure as fast as possible, while still maintaining accuracy. Being flexible and having an abundance of measuring strategies in your artistic quiver definitely helps -- measure twice and paint once (alla prima -- au premier coup).

You sure know how to render the "shine" of a car's surface. Page 75 of your book Imaginative Realism shows an even more amazing example.

It seems as if pencil measurements would fix the scale of your drawing -- a 1:1 relationship between an arm's length measurement of an element of your subject and the same element in your drawing suggests that holding your sketchbook out at arm's length would determine the frame of your composition. Is this correct or am I missing something?

Bob, yes, normally a measured segment would translate directly to the surface of the sketch, but it works proportionally, too. That is, a given unit could be repeated and checked within the subject, and then a corresponding unit of a different length could form the basis of measurements in the drawing.